A turn of phrase

A name from the past: C. Northcote Parkinson has a page at Economist.com, excerpted from Tim Hindle’s guide to management gurus. Looking back, it’s not clear to me that Parkinson was ever serious in his assertion that “work expands to fill the time available for its completion”—the sequels that he generated suggest that he had found a moneyspinning idea that he could not drop—but back in high school in the 1970s, at least some of us took him seriously. John Lund was on my debate team, a year or two ahead of me, and John’s politics were substantially righty. He made a specialty of arguing either side of whatever resolution we were working that year—funding secondary education, judicial reform—from the standpoint of Parkinson. Assigned the affirmative position that the federal government should clean up the air and water, John could argue (not necessarily persuasively) that the most effective way to stop pollution is to do nothing about it. As was often the case with counterplan and other gimmick tactics, they often succeeded because the other side had no specific preparation against John and his partner’s preposterous lines of reasoning.